KOLKATA: It was a winter evening in 1985. Reginald John had just returned home at Pilkhana in Howrah from office and was having tea with his wife when they heard a knock on their door.
“In those days, Howrah was cut off from Kolkata and Pilkahana was in the back of beyond (though merely 3km from Howrah station). People would turn in early and streets would be deserted by evening,” said John, the administrative officer of Seva Sangh Samiti. On opening the door, John was surprised to see a familiar face smiling at him. “It was my friend Dominique Lapierre. He pushed a book into my hands, ‘The City of Joy’, which he had based on characters we had met in the congested slums of Pilkahana,” he said.
‘City of Joy’ was later adapted for a film, directed by Roland Joffe and starring the late Om Puri and Patrick Swayze among others. Om Puri essayed the role of a rickshaw puller, one of the two protagonists in the film.
A 500m walk through a serpentine lane, flanked by biryani stalls and rickshaw stands, leads to the Seva Sangh Samiti health centre. Lapierre would often help out here. “Dominique used to visit Pilkhana for his work and he was deeply concerned by the level of poverty and lack of even basic amenities,” said John.
Most residents of Pilkhana said they never met Lapierre but had heard about him and his book from “their elders”. “Pilkhana was more impoverished than it is now. A foreigner visiting them and enquiring about their living conditions so touched the people that they shared their experiences as fables with their next generations,” said Arshad Hussain (44), a resident of Pilkhana.
Thirty-seven years later, a walk through the slums gives an impression of transformation in the neighbourhood, but scratch the surface and the veneer falls off. The narrow lanes are just wide enough to allow one person to walk through. Pilkahna still doesn’t have a proper school and Seva Samiti Sangha remains the most important source of medical care. “Progress in the area has been restricted to cellphone shops, biryani stalls and hundreds of cycle rickshaws. Even three and half decades after Sahab ji (Lapierre) wrote about us, not much has changed,” said Maktoob Ali (65), a pan-seller,who never met Lapierre but has heard about the ‘City of Joy’.
